Instagram Business Chat: Build Communication With Customers

Are you interested in improving your Instagram business chat? We’ll share practical strategies you can implement today to utilize IG for business. This is worthwhile to improve customer experiences and generate more sales on the social media platform. 

Overall, the business chat feature is a great addition to any strategy on social media. However, you’ll need to have an Instagram account. This unlocks more features and ensures that your business is in the best position to succeed.

Also, don’t forget to read the end of the article for additional help in improving your business. Here at Plixi, we specialize in helping brands get the most out of Instagram as a marketing platform.

What Does Business Chat Mean on Instagram?

Are you wondering what business chat means on Instagram? It’s when business accounts engage with other accounts in the Instagram direct messaging feature. For example, the text will be gray if you’re using a regular account and interacting with a business chat. This is an easy way to determine whether you’re interacting with a business chat. 

Also, you can find them by looking at the message request section. Here, you can see the different businesses operating on Instagram that want to get in touch. Note that some businesses engage in spam messages while others are highly targeted. Usually, the more targeted messages have a higher success rate when using chat.

5 Top Reasons To Use Business Chat

Now, let’s turn our attention to the top reasons why you may want to use IG business chat. This will give you more ideas for expanding the scope of your marketing efforts on Instagram. Competitors already use some of these strategies. Hence, you’ll need to consider them to keep up. 

Customer Support

You can provide customer support via business chat. It’s Instagram’s version of live chat. In most cases, you’ll need to wait for customers to message your business to ask for help. However, if you notice unhappy customers on Instagram, consider sending them a message. This shows your customer base that you are proactive about helping customers get the best experience.

You may need to employ dedicated support staff to deal with customer service messages. This is especially true when your business experiences significant growth. More customer support staff will reduce the waiting time to receive a response.

Surveys and Research

You can conduct consumer research by using the Instagram business chat functionality. Therefore, you can ask a series of questions in the form of a survey or questionnaire. This is not the most efficient method since you can use surveying software to improve data collection. However, the messaging functionality allows for a more detailed interaction. You can always add a link diverting users to a survey.

You can improve your business with the information you gather from interacting with customers. For example, you can add new products or change the Instagram content you share on the platform. This may lead to a significant Instagram follower count boost. 

Get More Customers

You can send marketing messages to IG accounts that have never interacted with your business. Hence, this gives you a chance to acquire new customers. However, you’ll need to message the right Instagram target audience to increase the success rate. This means doing the right research to gather relevant customer lists. 

Also, it’s a great idea to take advantage of DM templates to automate the process. This allows you to send the same marketing message to a large number of Instagram accounts. Make sure that you create effective DM templates. Also, test the templates to increase the conversion rate.

Chatbots

Did you know that Instagram business accounts can use chatbots to improve customer engagement? This is especially handy if you have scaled your Instagram account and can’t manage the number of questions. 

The quality of chatbots is constantly improving to offer quick replies to your target audience. This means you can improve customer support without investing large sums of money.

However, it’s also handy to give customers the option to escalate their Instagram DM interactions with a real person. This is handy when chatbots don’t provide the required help.

Share News and Updates

You can provide news about your products and business through the Instagram messaging tool. This gives you a good reason to enter into conversation with your followers and potentially sell products. 

Also, customers may appreciate it if you give them updates of interest. Hence, make sure that you only share the biggest updates to avoid spamming customers’ DM inboxes. Also, you can use templates to increase the efficiency of your news DM strategy. 

3 Different Types of Instagram Accounts

Do you want to know if getting a business account is worth taking advantage of the DM functionality? Here’s a summary of the types of Instagram accounts that you can choose from:

• Personal profile: This is the average IG profile type that most users on Instagram are using. 
• Business profile: This profile type comes with massive advantages for brands. This includes product hashtags and dedicated product pages. Also, businesses can use chatbots to automate the messaging process. 
• Content creators: These profile types are reserved for users who want to make a living by sharing content. It’s not the option that should be chosen by businesses looking to sell more products and services.

5 Best Practices for How To Use Instagram for Business

Are you wondering how to use Instagram for business? In this section, we’ll share some of the top best practices you need to keep in mind. This ensures you utilize the features to their full potential when dealing with customers.

Create Different Instagram DM Templates

To speed up the process of dealing with swarms of customers, you’ll need to use DM templates. There are prepared messages that are used in situations where a copy-paste response makes sense. Here is a list of scenarios for when DM templates are a good idea:

• Welcome new followers: You can send a message to every new follower. This message can include details of what content they can expect to see when checking out the account. This includes the posting frequency and the type of posts, whether reels, posts, or Instagram Stories. 
• Answer Questions: Do your Instagram followers have the same set of similar questions? Then, you can use DM templates to answer them. This will save time in the long run. 
• Share promotions and discounts: You can create an Instagram DM template that provides new info on the latest deals. All you have to do is enter the current discount amounts into the template, and you are good to go. 
• Account Updates: Are you changing how you release content to your Instagram audience? Then, creating a template is a great way to do this faster. You can send these templates to your entire audience at once. 
• New Products: Consider creating a DM template dedicated to sharing new products. The only manual addition is adding specific info about the new products. This keeps customers informed and will increase your new product sales.

Tone Must Reflect the Brand

Your business chat Instagram messages can stand out when dealing with customer queries. For instance, you can go for a playful tone if that’s a good match for your brand. This can make boring customer service interactions memorable. It reduces the friction of dealing with problems and may reduce frustration levels.

It’s a good idea when the tone of the business chat reflects the content you’re sharing. This includes the posts, Instagram Reels, stories, and more. Hence, your tone will match what the audience is used to seeing from you.

Reduce the Response Time

It’s important to keep the response time to a minimum to ensure you don’t keep customers waiting. They might have questions they need answered to move along the sales funnel. In fact, by answering the question, they might be ready to buy right away. However, they might decide to look at your competitor’s Instagram shops if you keep them waiting for too long. 

You can reduce the response time by hiring employees to answer Instagram questions. This could be an Instagram social media manager. Additionally, take advantage of chatbots to automate answers. At the very least, provide an automated response that states you’ll get back to them shortly. 

Take Advantage of Product Hashtags and Pages

Did you know that upgrading a business account unlocks product hashtags and pages? The latter are dedicated pages where you can sell products directly from Instagram. This means you don’t need referral traffic to send users to your website. 

Selling from Instagram might be a better approach to piggyback off the brand’s reputation. However, you can divert users to your website once they begin to trust your company. This can take time, so you’ll need to adopt a long-term mindset when running a business on Instagram.

Segmentation

Use software at your disposal to uncover as much data about your customers as you can. This may involve the use of customer relationship management software. Then, use the data to segment your lists based on different variables.

For example, you can create a list of customers who bought a specific product. After releasing an updated version of the product, you can give this list an update. This is also known as targeted marketing and is highly effective. Customers love to receive targeted marketing messages since it saves them time from researching.

Is Instagram Business Chat Important?

To summarize, using IG business chat is essential if your account is in the business category. It ensures that you offer customers added support when they need help or want more information.

You can look at how competitors implement their Instagram business chat to get ideas. Simply interact with their accounts as regular customers and pay attention to the small details. This includes the quality of the answers, response, time, and if they use DM templates.

Are you looking for additional strategies to grow your Instagram account? Then, use the services provided here at Plixi. We offer a combination of an Instagram influencer network and an in-house algorithm to target the right audience. So what are you waiting for? Start growing and gaining Instagram followers today.